The Weequahic Diner

I do not remember at what age when our family first started going
there. We had in in at the “Diner”, mom was a waitress
there. The stories she would tell us about the customers, the famous,
infamous, the characters that came in and of course the Bauman Brothers.
But it was the atmosphere and of course, if we children did not
behave, a trip to the bathroom and the warning after if we did not
behave, we would not come here again.

1960’s

So let us fast forward. I am now in my teens and driving. Friday
and Saturday nights are spent with either a date or friends at a
rear booth. The food was always great and sometimes mom waited on
us. The monkey dishes filled with the “chef’s salad”,
the dinner rolls, and the great cream pies and the most important
item, the cheesecake! Pastry shell surrounding the very creamy cheesecake
center, one could never find a better cheesecake anywhere.

Oh, have to go to work at the Diner Friday and Saturday nights,
6pm to 6am during the summer. Working alongside my mother, she is
now the night manager is a trip. People know her, not just the regular
customers, but people who have heard of her and the service she
demands of the entire crew. It is a Saturday evening, 5pm, the parking
lot is full and families are lined up out the door waiting to be
seated. It is hot in the summer, so, and here is what people were
amazed at; I would bring glasses of cold water and finger snacks
out to those waiting.

Can’t forget the 3am crowd. A mix of every walk of profession
mixing, cops, detectives, vise-squad, local Jersey mobsters, ladies
of the evening, semi-drunks and well known singing artists having
performed in NYC.

:Meet me at the Diner” and you know to go to the Weequahic
Diner. It is gone now, I left NJ in 1972, returning to San Diego,
CA where my final U.S. Navy station said, “no more snow here”.
It is now 2014 and while dinning with my wife, one of the floor
managers at the restaurant, being from NY, knew of the Diner. The
history, warmth and friendliness that the Bauman Brothers created
lives within us that have had the great fortune to eat and or work
at the Diner.